PitchMe

Current recruitment that relies on CVs is often driven by stereotypes and doesn’t offer equal opportunities for employment. 

PitchMe creates a unique talent marketplace in the recruitment landscape. It empowers candidates to demonstrate their knowledge and abilities allowing anyone with relevant skillset to apply for a position regardless of their age, gender, formal educational background and employment history. We introduce an anonymous skillsourcing process, relying on multilayer profiling of candidate’s skills and matchmaking between those offering their skills and those who need them.

By analysing a range of digital sources, the profile identifies what skills a person has, and what he needs to improve in order to qualify for a particular occupation. It shows existing workers new ways of transitioning between occupations and sectors where their skillset is demanded.

We aim to create a talent ecosystem that supports inclusive employment and continuous upskilling and reskilling for the future of jobs.

We are addressing a number of inter-related problems within the current recruitment sector.

1. CV is not an accurate tool of professional presentation.

2. 16M students are graduating in Europe every year. On average it takes between 6 and 9 month for a graduate to find a job. This is due to a lack of alignment between formal education systems and labour market needs. 

3. 60% of young professionals worldwide lack the skills and resilience needed to gain relevant jobs and play a positive role within society. They try to compensate it with online courses. However, the blind choice of online education does not solve disconnect between learning new skills and rapidly changing employment market. 

4. In many disciplines (mostly STEM) there is imbalanced representation of women and candidates from disadvantages socio-economic background. To support inclusion we designed an anonymous objective process of profiling and matchmaking.  

5. The current structure of recruitment makes it difficult to make a career shift since it relies on the employment history and not on skills. The average person will change careers 5-7 times during their working life according to career change statistics.

1. We target the most vulnerable audience of the recruitment process: people who did not nave chance to acquire higher education (formal education) due to various reasons. Those candidates who are trying to adjust to rapidly changing business environment have no ability to invest time and money into university education. 

2. Career shifters  and candidates with non-obvious career story who are also challenged by the fact that current recruitment judges candidate mostly based on their employment history.

3. SMEs with no internal HR team and with a limited recruitment budget. At the moment we are working with tech and creative sectors, but are planning to expand to wider industries (financial, sales, management, etc.)

4.  Online education platforms - PitchMe will be an outsourced career service for MOOCS (Massive Open Online Courses).

We designed a new tool of professional self-presentation – SmartMe profile.  It offers a new framework for candidate’s digital professional identity. It allows PitchMe not only to create a comprehensive picture of hard and soft skills as well as psychometric profile, but also to advise how to improve employability in order to address the emergent needs of the market. 

 Our proprietary methodology enables us to work with following data sources (collecting all data with candidate's consent):

- social networks

- professional and freelance websites

- media and personal blogs

- portfolio websites

- online gaming.

Our matching algorithm supports inclusion and equality by relying only on skills.

High schools and Universities use our Skill Map to gain a bird’s eye view on the modern employment trends and tailor education plans to meet needs and trends of the emerging job market. By creating a profile with us at the beginning of the course and getting access to recommendations from our platform, student select modules that will prepare them for the future work.

Our marketplace connects online education providers and offers personalised suggestions of education modules based on the analysis of the job market demand.

Our main product - the SmartMe profile makes us to stand out from our competitors. We consider it as an innovation because:

- of the way it is designed

- of the way it is built

- of the sources we use to extract skills. 

We also created a proprietary methodology of skills assessment based on the big data. We have spent 9 months working with psychologists and data scientists to calculate soft skills from the big data without questionnaires and tests.

Our matching algorithm is build on the existing skills matching approach but improved through the importance of position key attributes and determinants which enables us to make 40% more accurate initial shortlisting.

Our marketplace does not have direct competitors as we are one of the first movers to integrate online education platforms into recruitment process.

We are mapping skills of a candidate generating "SmartMe profile" forms. This profile is build using information from a variety of sources to present a most accurate picture of hard and soft skills of the candidate, as well as his psychological profile. Using our proprietary algorithms, we match data from the SmartMe profiles with the needs of the employer. Shortlisted candidates validate their skills by passing the task designed for each position as a next stage of the assessment. The whole process is anonymous to avoid bias and support diversity of candidates.

Our technology is also applicable for recruiters who get an opportunity to utilise their database more efficient. Any database can be updated and transformed into SmartMe profiles, expanding the capacity of the talent pool. 

We have been fully operating since 2018 and last month we launched a new version of the platform. Looking at the trends of blockchanization and its penetration into education sector, we are going to develop a blockchain infrastructure in order to meet those trends.

As we have been operating since 2017, we have a number of success stories which we use as an evidence of the efficiency of our product. We have worked on average with 150 employers and keep track of our performance based on their feedback. So far it is:

- 40% more accurate initial shortlisting

- 2 in 17 our candidates receive job offer

- 80% pass trial period.

We also have success stories of candidates, when they found a dream job via our platform but not via a recruiter. They could not pass the initial stage of the interview with the recruiter because of the "no fit" criteria. Reasons they had been rejected: gender, employment history, education. When they applied via our platform - they had been hired by the employer they were aiming for. 

We have created more than 25.000 SmartMe profiles for candidates. We have profiles of people from all over the world who are actively seeking job opportunities. So far, we have staffed 110 positions for 150 employers.

In one year we are aiming to staff 2000 positions, have profiles of 100.000 candidates, work with 500 employers.

In 5 years we are aiming to x5 those numbers. 

We have a four major directions for further development:

1. Further improvement our technology including: skill-assesment technologies, matching algorithms; real-times analysis of the job market demands. 

2. Development of new partnerships with traditional educational institutions and online education platforms.

3. Marketing that will support awareness about our platform and its accessibility among low income populations.

4. Expansion to new markets in countries where our solution is most needed.

Next year, we are going to increase a number of sources for data analysis of candidates platform and offer new form of integration of PitchMe with one/two traditional universities.

In five years, we will be expanding into new job sectors (medicine, education etc).

The risk  for the next year is struggling against the traditional mindset of employers, that would like to have the full information about employment history and educational background of candidates.

An additional internal risk for next year is shortage of skilled staff and financial resources.

One of the risks we can face in next five years - lack of the available data from digital footprint, due to changes in the legal environment and platform's API. 

We address the challenge of access to data by obtaining license from valuable sources. We also are working on the new solution which will help us to be independent from the third parties, including relying on the technology of personal data wallets that will allow the candidates to share with us directly the data they think can be valuable for analysis of their skills.

We are going to produce research and share outcome of it via media to show that our approach does not only support inclusivity, but also allows employers to find the best candidates. We will show that it is the interest of employers to rely on anonymous process and use our algorithms.  

As for our internal risk, we believe that we have built a very strong team that is dedicated and determined to find our marketing mix and positioning. We are also fundraising to give us a sizeable runway.

4 Co-founders

7 full-time

2 part-time

Our team has a unique skillset and knowledge that distinguishes us from other HR tech companies. Our co-founders have over 30 year of experience in total and come from various backgrounds: academia, business and IT.

We have have been nominated for multiple Awards recognising our project and team:

1. City Rising Start Award 2017

2. Young Professional of the Year Award, 2017.

3. AIconics, AI for good, 2019

4. Europas Award, Best HR tech, 2019

Our data scientists and psychologists have vast experience in working with big data and behavioural studies. 

Our CTO had 2 previous exits.

We partner with tech hubs and education providers in London:

- Huckletree

- Tech Hub

- Red Academy

- General Assembly

Providing their members special deals for hiring.

We partner with universities in the UK and Europe, working with departments of computer science, mathematics, engineering. We help their students to prepare for the future work.

We have 4 revenue streams: 

- fixed fee for employer 
- technology licensing to recruiters 
- custom-made products for HR 
- loyalty programs with partners

We are raising our second round now and also are reinvesting revenue back in the company.

We feel that the challenge that we address requires a global collaboration and dialogue. Therefore, we are looking for opportunities to engage with a leading experts and communities of innovators that will help us to improve our capacity to address the challenges on our agenda and expand the horizons of our thinking.

We are also looking for "smart funding" opportunities, when the funding will come from the investors and community of experts, whose expertise can help us to develop our project.

Since our platform seeks to address the gap between the traditional educational system and the future of jobs, we are particularly interested in engagement with major universities, that drive innovative processes, and therefore a competition that is sponsored by MIT is something we particularly interested in.

Finally, we believe that Solve can offer a unique opportunity for outreach to new audiences and sharing our vision and solution, how to solve the challenges we described above.

We will dedicate those money in following ways:

- we will run dedicated business development to educate more employers about importance of inclusion via workshops, public talks

- we will make special pricing for employers willing to participate in our "Inclusivity Challenge" and make it our unique marketing program

- subscribe online education providers offering STEM courses to support employment opportunities for underrepresented community

If we win the prize, we will:

- increase our marketing spending in order to engage more female candidates on our platform

- we will start educational podcast or video channel for women to help them build their online presence and increase employment opportunities

- focus on development of STEM employment opportunities for women

If we win this prize, we will speed up our foreign market expansion by increasing marketing spending. We have planned to start working with new countries next year but will be able to start in Autumn.